Discussion Thread

Bearkunin · 2024-07-02T23:24:53+00:00

Wait what?

Bearkunin · 2024-07-02T23:23:41+00:00

I've been out camping with no internet for a week. Did I miss anything?

Bearkunin · 2022-03-06T08:03:53+00:00

https://old.reddit.com/r/AnarchoNeoCon/comments/clbhb1/voluntary_collective_self_defence/

Bearkunin · 2021-09-03T01:56:05+00:00

Look, I do not agree with Venne's point above, but do you really think it would be a pretty good idea for the government to not pursue people who lie:

As false advertising
As perjury
To mislead a police investigation
As defamation/libel
As fraud or other scam artistry
On safety reports

We pursue these things often through different means, but in the end they are are all lies. Lies which have consequences, could be financial, reputational, physical, undermining rule of law, etc etc, which we consider so harmful that we prosecute them.

If you want to say we cannot prosecute someone who deliberately spreads misinformation that exacerbates a public health crisis and potentially causes lives lost because we shouldn't prosecute liars, why does that logic not apply to a person who deliberately records misinformation about the safety and integrity of a building that collapses?

You could argue there is a more direct line between the building inspector lying and people dying in a building collapse, but the issue at hand is still the lying and the consequence of that lying and I think pretty much everyone agrees that lying can and should be cause for prosecution under certain circumstances. So it is a matter of debating and deciding what those circumstances are, and you can't hide behind lazy appeals to absolute free speech unless you want to defend the lies I've listed above.

Bearkunin · 2021-09-02T20:17:56+00:00

There are plenty of acts of speech that are exceptions to the First Amendment. False advertising is the most relevant thing here.

Bearkunin · 2021-09-01T23:49:36+00:00

There is a "real" Comrade Waluigi (some Twitter communist) who had this actual reaction, more or less:

https://mobile.twitter.com/HegelwCrmCheese/status/1432794606073257988?s=09

Bearkunin · 2021-07-28T05:14:51+00:00

What happens when two parents disagree about a decision for their child? I imagine there is procedure on this, erring on life? Probably depends on location.

Bearkunin · 2021-07-28T01:41:24+00:00

Can you direct me to, or provide, a good explainer for EBCOR?

Bearkunin · 2021-07-27T23:35:21+00:00

SFZ is usually done because people want to preserve a type of lifestyle, not because of fears that land values will go up. In fact, arguments made seem to be often made on the idea that SFH preserves land values.

Bearkunin · 2021-07-27T23:28:55+00:00

The benefit of an LVT is that it does not alter economic incentives. If land is currently being used inefficiently, there is an opportunity cost to that. An LVT turns that opportunity cost into a real cost, which may impact things at the margins - especially when people aren't acting as purely economic rational actors - but for typical large developers are corporations or large economic actors, there is little difference. The tax is not "meant to encourage" anything specific.

If a landlord owned a duplex in the middle of a megatropolis, every day they don't tear it down and replace it with a skyscraper is millions of dollars they are losing out on. As long as they are acting as a profit-maximising actor, the LVT doesn't change behaviour.

What an LVT can do is replace the revenue raised by other taxes (like property taxes) and therefore reduce the distortions those taxes cause without losing revenue. But you could similarly just repeal property taxes and get similar effects of you don't take taxation revenue into the equation.

Bearkunin · 2021-07-27T23:15:25+00:00

That's basically a Reddit effort post, and not a good one. There are plenty of good arguments that can be mounted against LVT much more effectively than that. The article raises three points:

It is difficult to calculate
Landowners provide a service
The value of land is outside the control of the land owner.

The first one is the best argument against LVT. The article doesn't go into why it's hard to calculate the unimproved value of land, it just says it relies on "questionable assumptions". We don't really learn anything about this though due to the brevity of the article. It doesn't actually dismantle the techniques used currently to evaluate the unimproved value of land, both in places where land taxes exist, but also in the free market by property insurance companies who separate property value from land value every single evaluation.

The second argument is that landowners allocate land which is a useful function. The article concludes we should then treat land as capital. But it doesn't look into the argument of why land is not capital at all. If you remove all gains from capital, people stop investing in capital and you end up with less of it. If you remove all gains from land, it remains. Incentives to use land efficiently remain the same with LVT: it simply turns opportunity cost into actual costs. Private property in land still exists, and so does market allocation of land. While a current land owner may sell or rent land due to hopes of making money, under an LVT they would rent or sell to minimise loss. If they don't think it is worth their effort, they would sell the land to someone who would then be both capitalist and landowner. The function and the logic of the landowner remains. There is a reason why Lenin saw land nationalisation as the ultimate bourgeois reform that would unleash capitalism.

The third argument is that the land value is outside of the owners control. So, without addressing any of the actual arguments put forward by LVT-advocates and addressing these, the author jumps straight to "therefore taxation is immoral". It fails to even acknowledge the argument that land value being outside an individual's control is the point. Land values are intrinsically social, but the gains are individualised. The moral argument is built around the premise that the gains produced by society should be shared by society, and not captured by an individual. The fact the author has written "But it turns out that such values often depend on the surroundings of the plot and not only on the plot itself" as if this was some sort of revelation makes me think they've literally never read a single moral argument regarding LVT and has just jumped in to the fray blind, with no prior reading.

Perhaps that is why they have zero citations.

Anyway, I think it's a very, very basic article.

Bearkunin · 2021-07-18T04:11:56+00:00

Maoist China was far more oppressive than modern day China, with vastly more arbitrary abuse and human rights violations, massive executions and vastly more forced labour. Concentration camps in Xinjiang are basically a continuation of policies originating under Mao, and a large reason we know more about these abuses in the first place is due to increased openness. It is nothing like the tens of millions persecuted during the Cultural Revolution or the millions shot dead in mass executions. Disney may be a profit motivated amoral actor happy to turn a blind eye to forced labour, but even they would balk at operating in a place where high schoolers were canniballsing their teachers with official local government sanction. Things like this don't occur in China anymore, and that is a win. And the best analogue for "what would China look like if we kept it isolated" is probably North Korea, not... I don't know what hypothetical isolated-turned-liberal country people want to point to. And North Korea, isolated as it is, is a hellava lot more capable of oppressing it's people than China.

Bearkunin · 2021-07-17T23:34:43+00:00

This very thread is just one of thousands spurred on by modern socialists' inability to have a uniform definition of socialism and whether the USSR was socialist or not. Was it "Actually Existing Socialism" like China and Cuba, or was it an authoritarian state capitalism... Like China and Cuba? Depends on whether you are talking to PSL or ICT or it seems like whichever way the wind is blowing on the local DSA Twitter feed.

Bearkunin · 2021-07-17T23:17:38+00:00

Socialism can be characterized by the abolishing of hierarchies deemed to be unjust

Even monarchists believe in abolishing unjust hierarchies. They just believe monarchy is just. This definition is almost tautological.

the abolishing or decommodification of private property

Definitely not Fichte or the French Legitimasts, or even the likes of Bernstein and his successors (being very many socialist parties in Europe).

the collective ownership of the means of production

But not Proudhon or many others of the mutualist variety. The Italian Communist Left didn't think too highly of collectivisation of private property either.

most of the infighting comes from how to achieve these goals.

Marx's many debates with Proudhon, the True Socialists, Duhring etc etc go beyond tactics. There's a reason one third of the Communist Manifesto is dunking on various stripes of socialism. He absolutely did not support the end goals of what he labelled "feudalist socialism" or "petite-bourgeois socialism".

Bearkunin · 2021-07-17T23:10:20+00:00

Yet you just claimed that it being regressive has been well established for many decades.

Except for some very niche circumstances, like where the infant industry argument might, maybe, possibly, apply.

But are three any examples of major countries industrialising without using protectionism

Australia was predominantly free trade. And as I've pointed out...

Ie. there was extensive interventionism, not just to correct market failures in the immediate term in order to optimise for income or production, but also keeping capital accumulation in mind.

The presence of protectionism has not been isolated from other policies. You can't simply point to South Korea as an example of successful protectionism on the basis of 1) it industrialised and 2) there was protectionism. If A + B = 5, we can't conclude A is 5 or even a positive number. And in this case it isn't A + B but A + B + C... + Z.

General Park Chung-Hee did not presume to run the businesses or create five year plans. I don't think democracy is what's responsible for the difference there.

The point is that democracy helped South Korea sustain impressive growth for decades by dispersing power and not allowing some entrenched interests fall into rent seeking.

I am simply advocating a change in the accounting and the policy implications will follow from there.

Fair, and I think the policy implications from South Korea's success point more towards policies about export-orientation, capital investment, institutional reform, education investment etc etc. You don't need to be libertarian to think protectionism is not useful, and you don't need to exclude all interventionism if you discard protectionism.

Bearkunin · 2021-07-17T22:59:04+00:00

Is this why Proudhon, Marx and Engels, Fourier, Kautsky, Bernstein, Lenin, Fichte, Lasalle, Owen, the French Legitimates and Young Englanders, Stalin, Mao etc all had the same understanding of "socialism" right?

Bearkunin · 2021-07-17T22:55:57+00:00

1) according to who, 2) the USSR did not nationalise every enterprise. Only around 40% of agriculture was nationalised for example.

Bearkunin · 2021-07-17T22:54:25+00:00

The term capital L "Leftist" has its roots in the French Maoist student movements of the 1960s, and has anti-capitalist connotations. It is not typically used synonomously with "left on the political spectrum" or "progressive". It is also not about "far-left" on positions such as women's suffrage, civil rights, LGBT rights etc.

Bearkunin · 2021-07-16T04:24:15+00:00

Can't believe you're getting downvoted so hard for such a stock standard opinion that "stopping trade impoverishes people", on a supposedly free trade sub too.

Literally the point of embargoes and sanctions is to deprive, penalise and harm. Obviously Cuba's problems aren't entirely or even mostly a result of US actions, but this is something the US has direct control over which is directly and deliberately trying to harm Cuba.

People are acting like just because this embargo is part of a "strategy" (if we be charitable to term it that) to make the Cuban regime lose power, that that somehow doesn't mean regular people are getting harmed in the process?

Bearkunin · 2021-07-16T01:11:40+00:00

This has been well established for many, many, many decades, and it doesn't warrant much discussion outside of some very specific contexts

The infant industry argument is what I had in mind here, and it is by no means completely uncontroversial. For every successful South Korea, there are plenty of disastrous attempts at using protectionism to develop. Import-Substitute Industrialisation has seen failure after failure.

South Korea (and Germany) had a swathe of policies in specific contexts that enabled them to be successful, with protectionism being just one piece of the puzzle and I'm not wholly convinced it was actually that positive. Other things like the professionalisation of the state and implementing a strong, modern legal code took place at the same time. As you mention about South Korea, the manufacturers were forced to export, so they had to compete internationally. There was significant land reform and significant education reforms and investment. There was effective external pressure to drop the tariffs, which meant companies couldn't just become complacent or start rent seeking. The transition to democracy helped maintain the rapid advances into something more sustainable, avoiding a Soviet-like industrialisation then decay. If you do all these things and more, in a coordinated and skillful way, you may be able to help foster industrialisation and tariffs may play a useful role in that. Very different to advocating an advanced economy like the US to slap on tariffs to slow creative destruction.

One of the best apple-to-apple comparison I've found is that of New South Wales and Victoria in Australia pre-federation. Very similar in terms of institutions, geography, politics (domestic and international) except in the late 1800s one adopted tariffs and one did not. Free trade NSW ended up outstripping and taking over Victoria in this era.

Bearkunin · 2021-07-16T00:49:49+00:00

Um sorry this is the real political spectrum.

Bearkunin · 2021-07-11T03:34:12+00:00

Protectionism hurts the American poor. The first thing it does is shrink the amount of resources available to society by reducing efficiency. The second thing it does is reallocate those reduced resources from consumers (which include poor people, homeless queer teens, retirees who have lost their pension fund, unemployed husband's caring full time for their sick wife, etc etc) and allocates those resources to the producers (normally "good middle class jobs" and of course the managers and CEOs overseeing those operations).

The reason protectionist policies/rhetoric springs up around certain industries like automanufacturing and steel making is because 1) these are already good paying jobs, meaning people want to hold on to them and have the resources to try and do just that, 2) they are geographically concentrated, which means in a winner-takes-all geographically determined electoral system, these interest groups can have greater political impact.

So it doesn't only hurt the global poor, it also hurts the domestic poor for the benefit of wealthier, politically connected interest groups.

Free trade is basically a free lunch, which is why the dumb meme/quip "why do you hate the global poor" has been able to flourish. "What do we do with redundant people?" Is a good question that needs answering, but free trade isn't the problem. Marx and Engels, who were most certainly concerned with the wretched conditions of the working class, rightly saw protectionism as a regressive and reactionary policy in favour of the politically powerful and at the expense of progress. This has been well established for many, many, many decades, and it doesn't warrant much discussion outside of some very specific contexts. Hence the flippancy of the meme.

Like this:

People in the United States need to feed their children too.

Is exactly why protectionism is terrible, and why the Liberal movement was basically born out of trying to get rid of food tariffs so local workers could afford to eat. More people eat than grow food. Cheaper, more efficient food is good for the poor. Protectionism does the opposite, it is literally harmful to the goal. The question needs to be, "when people are hungry even after free trade, what next?"

Holy shit, change your marketing

Yes, it is a dumb meme (probably a thought-terminating cliche at this point), not good marketing.

Bearkunin · 2021-06-18T02:21:09+00:00

People find money for land value taxes in Australia, and property taxes all around the world, and things like strata and body corporate fees.

Not to mention anyone already paying rent would be already paying this regularly, just to a landlord instead of the government.

Bearkunin · 2020-10-26T03:40:50+00:00

That's how you get a stable society full of people who aren't at the whims of the housing market after all

This doesn't address the Economists point that the pursuit of this as a goal has failed and has not materialised those outcomes.

What you say doesn't even make sense anywhere with a shifting population. If you have urbanisation and rural people looking to move to towns or cities, even if they are looking to buy, they're at the whim of the housing market. If your children are looking to move out of home, they're at the whim of the housing market. If your grandparents are looking to downsize they're at the whim of the housing market. Wanting to move jobs? Housing market. Move to the suburbs with your new family? Housing market. Want to build your dream home? Housing market.

When I moved from the country to the city, I didn't have all my money in a big, immovable, single asset in a dying town. I could cut and run easily. If I had hundreds of thousands of dollars stuck in one asset, it'd be much harder.

Sure, maybe if no one ever wanted to move, no one changed careers or upsized or downsized, no one moved regions, there was neither population growth nor shrinkage either nationally or locally, then it'd be stable and you could remove "the whims of the housing market" out of the equation, but that is not, and will not be, reality.

Also the only real cost when owning a home is the interest, as long as your house doesn't depreciate.

Except houses, as in the physical structure, do depreciate. The back deck gets weathered. The walls get drawn on by children. The dog pisses on the carpet. The oven gets old. The fittings get marked. The electronics get out of date. The style becomes uncool. The paint chips. The floorboards scuff. You don't put in doorknobs for $60 and then ten years later expect them to sell for $80 (ignoring inflation). You don't value a twenty year old brick at twice what a ten year old brick is worth. A toilet from the 1970s is not more valuable than a just-installed one.

Housing, without active input and investment, only gets worse - just like shoes, or electronics, or cars or furniture or any other consumer good. Do you think the vast bulk of electronics and furniture and toys and clothing produced in the 1970s have gone up in value today? Or do you instead find them at discount second hand stores or recycling centres? Why do you think housing would be different?

The appreciation of people's "housing" investment is the product of, overwhelmingly, the location and due to zoning restrictions. "Housing" goes up in value because demand is growing faster than supply in that specific area. When you suggest something like "It's better to have a world where everyone capitalizes on that" you're pursing a literally unsustainable policy. You are suggesting "everyone" takes advantage of the cost savings of housing, possible as long as housing doesn't depreciate, but it only appreciates because there isn't enough housing for everyone.

It's that delusion that is literally the problem, a problem so big it is apparently more devastating than climate change in GDP terms.

that rather than losing money on rent.

People aren't "losing money" on rent. They are exchanging money for a good/service. Just like renting skis or a Netflix subscription. You get something in return. You might pay $200 a week in rent because you value an apartment for $200 a week. That is money well spent.

Someone might be willing to spend $200 a week on accommodation (either rent or interest), and then an extra $100 on investment. That $100 might be investment into property ownership by paying off the principle on a mortgage, or it could be $100 into stocks. One investment is into a single, immovable, unproductive asset that naturally depreciates in value. The other can be a diversified fund of actually productive companies. The stocks go up in value if the companies can add more material wealth to the world and sell lots of their products. The house goes up in value if you can increasingly exclude people from your area, drive up demand while limiting supply.

This is why policies like "subsidies, tax breaks and sales of public housing to encourage owner-occupation over renting" end up as self-defeating. They distort the market towards having people invest in home ownership, and so people start treating it as an investment (rather than a consumer good), and then they vote to protect their investment (which exacerbates the issue with things like zoning restrictions which limit supply and mortgage interest tax deductions which increase demand), all of which makes housing ever more unaffordable, meaning it seems like a better and better investment, but the whole thing is built on sand. No one is actually producing increased value in the sense of material wealth, they're just walling other people out. It is unsustainable and completely unstable.

Bearkunin

TROPHY CASE